If there's one thing this world needs, in times like these, it's another blog by a white fella talking about the news and culture he loves to hate.
All in the BIG questions
The Contingency of Oarsmen
We call it inhuman, we call it monstrous, we call it illness--a pleading hope for distance, as though there has ever been anything on the planet capable of these things, besides the human being. As though we could disown it. As though we might, through civilized heartbroken denial, absolve the human race by mere redefinition.
Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, Mouseketeers
"We don’t have two hours or even two minutes to risk such a thing as enduring a failure to entertain. Better to delve back into the comfortable imaginary worlds that enthralled us when we were kids. Like Facebook, Disney--and it’s not just Disney--is just repackaging and reselling us our own memories. Free and open? All right, man."
"But it makes the world a more callous and inhumane place, to insist that what actually happened did not, to believe that our shared reality is just a tightly controlled causation machine for the unsighted masses to cog away in, while only the masterminds and the few for whom *truth* has been revealed really know what's going on."
"It's Always Been Thus."
"The truth is that the lowest common denominator always sells, and always has, and always will--because some of the population is dumb enough to just straight up buy it, and the rest is all-too-pleased to get off on their own self-aware self-congratulation to do anything besides continue to lap it up, too."
Friday Night LinkDump TakeStorm! Or TakeDump Linkstorm! Or, whatever!
"The morality of any given entity or situation isn’t secondary to him--it’s utterly non-existent, a non-factor. I think this comes out of a peculiar sort of reductive nihilism--a specific sort that I first noticed in very redneck-y poor white people, but I recognize more and more elsewhere, now. They believe they have discovered the absolute base, terrible nature of our true humanity, and have no illusions about it. Everyone is just another shit-stain human being. None of us are any better, all of us are utter shit with nothing to redeem us. To pretend otherwise is just the false, politically-correct nonsense of “putting on airs.”
“You ain’t no better than me, because none of us is any better than our absolute worst selves,” they believe. All of us just crabs in a big ol’ bucket."
When To Punch Nazis
"This is a problem of confusion about institutions, I think. Even if you grant some of the absurdity above--that the cost of education or healthcare is violence, for instance [ed. note: Blogger had mild aneurysm trying to grant said point, shouted “NO GODDAMN IT, VIOLENCE IS VIOLENCE, YOUR FUCKING TUITION IS NOT VIOLENCE,” and quite startled the cats.]--it is beyond ridiculous to suggest that Cletus in his Nazi get-up must be held accountable for your institutional grievances, no matter how valid."
John Oliver Savagely Dunks on Second Grader
When you refuse to even nod in the direction of the rapid pace of change, when you dismiss the sincere concerns--to be clear (again again again) I think they're mostly wrong--of millions as absurd random nonsense, you only exacerbate the divide. You're not interested in conversation with these people, you believe them to be outside The Project. And then they go and elect a screaming lunatic and huckster as president of the United States, the shrieking and growling fruit of our rotten tree, just for the indignant satisfaction of having a flaming middle finger in your face all the time.
We ignore Jones' brand and influence at our own peril. Not because of who he is or what he says, but because of what his success says about us, what it says about the appetite of the public. How did ignoring The Deplorables work out last time?